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Playlists 101: Publishing & Managing Content With Fugo

This guide walks you through everything you should know about creating, scheduling, publishing, and managing your Fugo content with playlists.

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Written by Sarah
Updated today

Table of contents


Playlists are the core concept at the heart of content creation with Fugo. We think publishing your content should be so easy that anybody on any team in any business should be able to do it (not just a veteran IT admin.)

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about creating & managing content though Fugo's Playlist feature set.

Before we get started, there are a couple of things to note:

  • If you haven't already signed up for Fugo yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.

  • You don't need to have a screen in order to create a playlist, but you will need to have paired a screen to our CMS in order to publish your playlist.


    For how to pair a screen, check out this guide. If you want to know which player platforms we support, check out our hardware collection.

Let's get started!


What types of playlist scheduling does Fugo support?

In Fugo, everything starts with a playlist. How and when it plays depends on the scheduling and screen assignments you give it. You can set up playlists in the following ways:

  • Recurring schedules – a playlist that repeats every day or on selected days of the week.

  • Date-based schedules – a playlist with a defined start and end date.

  • Network-wide assignments – playlists published to every screen in your network (e.g. company-wide announcements).

  • Location-specific assignments – playlists published only to selected sites or facilities (e.g. content for a single warehouse or office).

  • Manual triggers – playlists that display only when manually activated from your account.

  • Service triggers – playlists that display in response to an external event, such as a deal being closed in HubSpot.

👆 Note: The first four items above aren’t different “playlist types.” They’re all just playlists, configured with different schedules and assignments.

Manual triggers and service triggers are the exception - these belong to Fugo’s Trigger feature set, which lets you publish playlists in ways that go beyond the standard playlist builder.

👉 Check out this guide for full Trigger setup instructions.

Basic rules about playlists

A few key things to keep in mind when working with playlists in Fugo:

  • As a core product feature, playlists are available on every pricing plan

  • You can restrict who has access to publish playlists via your People, Spaces & Roles controls

  • There’s no limit to how many playlists you can create in your account.

  • There’s no limit to how many playlists can be published to a single screen.

  • Screens don’t require a single “master playlist” that you routinely add & remove content from - you can have multiple playlists with different purposes & schedule assignments.

  • If multiple playlists are published to the same screen, they’ll play in the order they were created (older first, then newer), unless scheduling rules are applied. In that case, Fugo will follow the scheduling commands.

  • If you have two playlists that overlap with each other, we will play the one that was created first.


How to publish a playlist

1. Log in to your Fugo account. If you haven't registered a Fugo account yet, you can head over to fugo.ai/app to start your 14-day free trial.

2. Navigate to the Playlist page in the top navigation bar.

3. Click either of the Create Playlist buttons.

4. This will open the playlist builder.

You can add screens, content, or scheduling in any order. For the purpose of this guide, we'll go sequentially down the page, starting with naming your playlist & adding a screen.

Name your playlist & add your screen/s

5. Start by giving your playlist a name in the top left corner of the page. We recommend using a name that's relevant & clear to make it easier to find in case you have multiple playlists.

I'll name mine "October Notices" because it will house a slideshow of announcements for my company that are relevant to the month of October.

5. Click Select Screens and choose the screen, screens, or screen group where you want this playlist to show.

If you have hyper local content that's relevant for only a small part of your network (E.g. your warehouse screens, then just select those.)

If you have content that's more broadly relevant to your entire network, you can choose All Screens.

I've just got one screen set up in my demo account, so I'll choose that one.

Note:

You can also publish a playlist to a Channel - that's a virtual screen that runs your Fugo content inside a browser or embeddable iFrame (which you can put into your intranet or other tools). 👉 Learn more about Channel set up here

If you haven't paired a screen to your account, click Create Screen in the popup and follow our instructions for pairing a screen.

6. Your selected screen/s will be listed on the Screens card now:

Add your content

7. Select content to add to your playlist by clicking Select Content.

8. This will open the content picker, where you can choose between:

Apps

Display a feed from one of Fugo's third party app integrations like Power BI, Looker, Google Slides, Canto, Dropbox & more.

Media

Display an image, video, audio, or presentation file you've uploaded to your media library.

Studio Content

Display a slide or slideshow you've created in the Design Studio.

Dashboards

Display a dashboard you've connected and saved to your Dashboard library via the TV Dashboards feature.

🤚 Hint! Use the search bar to find your content faster.

I'm going to select a slideshow of custom slides I created in the Design Studio from the Studio Content tab:

Psst! Here's what it looked like to build this playlist in the studio:

9. Click Add Items when you’ve finished choosing your content. It will now be listed on the Content card.

10. If you want to add more content to this playlist, click Add More Content and choose more items (such as an app, media, or dashboard.)

💁 Note: if you see an orange gear notification next to an item in your playlist, that means you need to configure the item's settings before publishing your playlist. That may mean configuring your media or app settings.

For example, I need to configure my BBC app settings:

11. If you want to change the duration of this item in your playlist - that is, how long this item runs inside your playlist - you can do so in the Duration field.

Note that you can not change Design Studio content durations from the playlist builder - you'll need to do that in the studio (because you may have multiple slides with multiple elements of differing durations.)

Add your schedule (optional)

12. Once your screen/s and content have been added, the playlist is ready to run. If you don't want to assign it any specific timing, you can hit Publish at the bottom of the builder.

Without any scheduling assigned, it will play indefinitely until you unpublish it.

13. If you want to get specific about when your playlist runs, then you can use the scheduling tools available on the Schedule card:

Date range

This allows you to set a start & end date for your playlist.

Untick the No End Date box to open the calendar so you can input your start & end dates.

Because my playlist is for the month of October, I'll set it to run between October 1st - November 1st.

🙋 Note on expiration dates: Playlists expire at 00:00 on the selected expiration date. This means the playlist will not play at all on that date.

So in my example playlist - if I set the expiration date to November 1, the playlist will stop at midnight as November 1 begins, thus ensuring it plays through the full month of October.

To have your content run through a specific day in full, set the expiration date to the day after the last day you want it to appear.

Week schedule

Use this to assign your playlist to run on certain days & times. Click the Week Schedule box to open the week scheduler.

You can click & drag along the scheduler:


​Select entire days:

Even add specific time blocks down to the minute:

Preview, save & publish your playlist

With all your inputs ready, your playlist is almost done! You can:

Click Preview to run through your playlist:

Click Finish later to save your playlist & come back to it.

Click Publish to push it to your screen/s. If your playlist is not set to start until a later date, it will start on that date (you won't see your screen content update until then.)

14. Your new playlist will now be listed as a card on your Playlists page.

We cover the controls on that page in this section.


How to trigger a playlist

In addition to standard playlists, Fugo supports Triggers. Triggers let you publish playlists in two ways:

  • Manual triggers – push a button in your account to publish a playlist immediately so it overrides your current content (E.g. displaying "Welcome" slide as a guest enters your office).

  • Service triggers – set up an automated workflow that publishes a playlist when certain conditions are met (e.g. a deal closing in HubSpot).

You'll set those up on the Triggers page of your account:

👉 Get the full run-down in our Triggers setup guide.


Managing playlists from your Playlists page

The Playlists page of your account is the primary space for managing your playlist content. You can access it from the top navigation bar:

Playlist page views

By default, your Playlist page will be set to the Cards view. You can use the switcher to switch between it and the List view:

Sorting & searching your playlists

At the top of your Playlists page, you can use the tools to

Search your playlists if you have many playlists & need to track one down quickly:

Filter playlists to show according to parameters for active status and playlist type (& more).

Sort your playlists alphabetically or by creation date:

The Playlist card / pane

Both the card & the pane will house helpful information about each playlist:

  • Status: Whether a playlist is published (that is currently running or scheduled) or a Draft (not finished yet).

  • Screens: Which screen/s the playlist is assigned to

  • Content: Small tile previews of the content assigned to the playlist

  • Last edited: (Shown in Card view only) when the last edit was to the playlist

Card view:

List view:

Edit, unpublish, duplicate, or delete a playlist

In the Cards view, click the circular radio button on the playlist card to open your menu. From there, you can edit, duplicate, unpublish, or delete your playlist:

You can bulk duplicate or delete playlists by selecting multiple playlists:

In the List view, you can use the circular radio button to open the bottom menu or use the dropdown menu on the playlist pane:

🤔 Why would I want to duplicate a playlist?

Duplicating is useful when you need a playlist that’s almost identical to an existing one, but with a few small differences. It saves you from rebuilding everything from scratch.

For example, imagine you’re creating two playlists to display a Team Executive Scorecard from Power BI - one for your East region and one for your West region.

Instead of creating the “West” playlist from scratch, you can duplicate the “East” playlist. That way, you skip the setup steps (creating and naming the playlist, signing into Power BI, configuring app settings) and go straight to adjusting the slicers for the West team:


Managing playlists from your screen's playlist tab

Playlists can also be found in the Playlists tab of a screen's individual dashboard:

You can get there by clicking on the screen's card from the Screens page:


Managing playlists from your Welcome page dashboard

When you sign into Fugo, you'll always land on your Welcome page first.

Scroll down a bit and you'll see a section that tells you a few stats on your playlists:

  • How many are published

  • How many are expiring soon (and which ones are)

  • How many have no screen assigned

  • How many have no content assigned

Click Manage your playlists to be taken to your Playlists page.


Need more help?

Reach out to Fugo’s support team if you need any help getting your playlists set up.

You can chat with us in the chat box or reach out to support@fugo.ai.

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